Movie Poster Project

This is a poster for The Lion King that I made in my media arts class.

Reflection for Photo Restoration Project

The photograph I used in my photo restoration project is very old and needed a lot of help. It’s a picture of my grandfather when he was in residential school back in 1919. That’s 94 years ago! My grandfather is in the bottom row, fourth from right with the black tie. This photo is important to me for two reasons. 

I never knew my grandfather from my father’s side since he died long before I was born. I don’t really know much about him. I know that he was a good man and made excellent French fries and hamburgers. I figured since I never knew him I ought to at least restore a photograph of him, arguably one of the earliest ever taken of him.

The kids in this photo are all young native children. They were taken away from their families and put in the residential schools, where they suffered greatly at the hands of priests and nuns.  Many of them were severely abused, physically and sexually. I don’t know if my grandfather was one of these many children or if he was lucky. I do know that residential schools were made to assimilate us, the native people. We were considered lesser beings (still are sometimes) and they tried to take away our culture, traditions, language and basically anything that made us who we were.  

The government still doesn’t care about what happened and it isn’t taught in schools despite being a part of Canadian and Quebec history. They’re just hoping that eventually we’ll all just forget about it or disappear. I wanted to show that I know what happened and I will not forget nor will I disappear. None of us will.

Restoring this photo was a challenge certainly. It had this one big scratch that ran across practically the whole picture! There was also that large rip on the upper left hand side and apparently somebody thought it a good idea to punch star shaped holes in places. One boy’s face was so badly damaged that I had to remove him completely. Another boy had a scratch running along his jacket, which wouldn’t have been that bad if his jacket hadn’t been checker board print. I had to zoom in really close, match the colours, and fix it just so. Getting the lines to match up was difficult. The rest was easier. The scratch was just a matter of matching colours and painting. The big rip was fixed using a Band-Aid tool in Photoshop. The star hole in the brick wall had to be fixed using the same method as the checker-board print jacket, zooming in and colouring to match the pattern. The chimney with the white out was also fixed using the bandaid and blurring tool in Photoshop.

Considering I started this project knowing literally nothing about photo editing/restoring or even how to use my editing software I think I did a pretty good job. I had to figure out how to do everything on my own since I don’t have the actual (expensive) Photoshop and the teacher was not familiar with my software that I downloading free online. It was a “learn as I go” type of relationship between my software and I, but now that I know how to use it this photo restoring thing could become a new hobby for me.

Photo Restoration Project

Before

After